Clinical ovarian cancers display extensive genetic heterogeneity, study suggests multiple treatment

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"The divergence of mutation profiles within tumors from individual women suggests that sequencing of multiple samples from a single patient may be necessary before a drug treatment protocol can be devised," said Paul Billings, Chief Medical Officer for Life Technologies. "Very different evolutionary pathways for each woman were observed in the study, which would have been missed if only one section of the primary tumor or just one of the metastatic lesions had been sequenced. The data suggest that if only one metastasis were to be biopsied and sequenced, a number of relevant driver mutations and druggable targets would likely be missed, which would be expected to lead to poor treatment outcomes."